Seasons Don't Fear The Reaper
by Cruelest Sea
Summary: From the beginning death has always been another member of the team.


**_Seasons Don't Fear the Reaper_**

_"I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph." - Jack Gilbert_

1.

Aiden Ford simply dies.

There's no fanfare, no elaborate rescues or tearful goodbyes, and not even another glimpse of earth, let alone a return trip. He's the youngest member of the team, and somewhat overly eager, like a child playing pirates or space rangers, heedless of the danger, so it's little surprise that he lasts only a brief while because there's no mercy in space for the young or the innocent, no kindness for those who try to find some comfort from the icy stars.

Face down in the water, he simultaneously dies and is reborn, stripped of who and what he once was and transformed into something only half familiar, as damaged as his ruined eye. If he'd died in the water, he would have been a hero, a tragic loss, but as it is he's merely collateral damage, an unfortunate result of someone who should have died and didn't. Sheppard, and some of the others try to save him, of course, if not in mind than in body, but he dodges them all, nearly up until the end with a speed born of the enzyme in the blood of a hollow form of a man who used to be someone else.

Aiden Ford burns up in the fires of an exploding wraith ship like the dying stars children wish upon back home, splintering without a trace across the galaxy, performing one last heroic deed, or perhaps, the first and final glimmer of atonement. It's a tragedy, but after a while no one remembers him except Sheppard, who forgets no one, even those who should have died long before they did.

2.

Elizabeth shuts down somewhere in empty space, simply drifting like a child rocked in a cradle. Its a cold, sterile term _shutting down_, for machines and not humans, but she isn't human, not anymore, and hasn't been for a long time, only a silent and complex machine that houses a mind that is somehow still finite, unable to comprehend the millennia that stretches ahead of her.

No one comes after her - that's what she intended, after all - in this cold sea of floating stars and empty space, a place without substance or meaning. She exists as a shadow, and not flesh and blood, not anymore, but she remembers everything, seared against her closed eyelids, every word, every color, because machines have a recollection a human never could. Sometimes, when she can bear it, she thinks of earth, of the day she left, and that strange twisted coil around her chest, the feeling of finality as she stepped away from that world and through the stargate. She was never meant to come home, it seems, and she knew it, in that strange way that people sense their own mortality, like a step on their grave in some distant future. But mortality is meaningless now, graves a thing of the past. She won't die and she won't end; she'll simply _be_, like some ancient star that never seems to burn out when all around it have been extinguished long ago.

It's ironic, in a way, that the woman who knew, somehow intrinsically, that she was never coming home, is the only one of them, in a way, to be immortal.

3.

In another life, or perhaps the same one, Carson Beckett dies in an explosion of fire and darkness, leaving nothing but ashes behind. He's a hero, as he always was, because bravery isn't simply made up of pulling trigger and courage is more saving one life than taking many. All of them were expendable, and it was only a matter of time before they realized it, but at the time none of them thought it would be him because a doctor seems somehow immune to death, as if a man who battles it to save so many others should, more than anyone else, know exactly how to cheat it.

When they find him again, or rather his clone because the wraith even with all their technology wouldn't have been able to bring Carson back from the dead, he has no memory of dying. It's a strange, foreign concept, even as his cells, weak, defective copies of real ones, continue to break down, and he wonders, even as his mind brims with Carson - the real Carson's thoughts - where one person starts and another begins, and exactly how much is shared.

In stasis Rodney programs Scotland for him, and he sees it all, the green field that the real Carson ran through as a boy, the home he grew up in, and his mother's face. These eyes have never seen any of it, but the mind remembers, like his hands, untrained, that somehow know exactly what to do with the instruments he uses.

When he's well and strong, he starts back to work, saving lives from one place to a next, and he becomes famous, in a way, his name passed like a hero from one world to the next. But it isn't his name, he knows, because he's living a life that isn't his, and those he saves are only through the skills of the man he was made from. He lives his life, and not his own, if he ever had one of his at all, but it's enough.

Some people die twice. But very few can say they've lived twice, too.

4.

Teyla is haunted by death.

It's the price the survivors pay, to walk with death clinging like dust to her hair and skin, moving and whispering the names of the dead in her ears. She's never died but she's witnessed more death than those twice her age, laid to rest nearly everyone she once knew. Death is part of her, some dark heritage from her people and her world, and she's alarmingly good at sending others to face it, skilled at killing wraith in a way not even Ronon is, as if the part of her DNA she shares with them makes her nearly feral.

Later, when she stands on a ledge and looks down into Michael's eyes she thinks, if only for a moment, that somewhere along the way she's lost all that set her apart, that once, only a little while ago, she would have reached for his hand instead of kicking it, and that watching him fall would have filled her with an inexpressible horror rather than hollow relief.

But that was a lifetime ago, and death, like many things, can change a person.

5.

Death knows Sheppard well, deeply, intimately, in the way no friend or lover ever could.

It knows the fears woven within each strand of DNA, the strength of every muscle and bone, and exactly how close he can come to death without being too far to snatch back. It's measured every breath between the whisper of life the wraith left in his body and the final one rattling in his throat, sifted them like grains of sand between the wraith's fingertips as Sheppard's life is poured back in. It's counted the years in a harsh, rasping whisper, every second of them as he lay in stasis, waiting for the past to begin to change the future, and his voice lingers, even if the events never come to pass in the altered time, because ripping a piece from the fabric always leaves some hanging threads that cannot be cut away.

Sheppard isn't afraid of death, at least not the silent, numbed terror most humans have, even when death lingers with him, peering over his shoulder and seemingly fascinated by him, hovering and waiting.

Death is many things but above all it is patient.

6.

More than the rest of them, Ronon is used to death.

He's seen it, face to face, in the eyes of the dying of Sateda, heard it's voice in the cries of an entire people destroyed in a single day. He ran with death after that, with it's tendrils embedded deep against his spine, heard it's sound in the wraith ships as they hunted him.

Once he even tasted it, like raw metal in his throat as he stumbled into a village, fluid filling his lungs and threatening to smother him. He'd been inches from it then when the girl had found him, but Ronon Dex is many things and above them all is survivor, and when death claims it's prize it's the village and not him, the reward for helping the living dead they call runners.

Later he feels death, watching it in his own reflection in the eyes of a wraith sucking his life away and slamming it back in, and it becomes a part of him as he hungers for it, as he begs his friends for it and they turn away. Death is patient, but his friends are more so, and he cheats it again, a battle hard fought and narrowly won.

After that, death hounds him, grasps for him with both hands, like the wraith who once pursued him, and it finally catches him with the subtle, effortless plunge of a knife into his back and through a lung, the tip disappearing between an even breath and a harsh one, a thin, small thing really, that does just the right amount of damage where it matters most. This time it's not the cold in his lungs, but his own blood, and he's drowning in it as McKay's voice mingles with Teyla's, his panic with her steady calmness, a promise to take him with them even as he tells them to go. He never hears her reply if she gives one because the world narrows to the taste of blood in his mouth and a final gasping struggle for air that doesn't come as his vision slips into gray.

It's a strange thing to be spilled out and poured back in, and to have dust turn to breath in tattered lungs. He gasps on air, blood and brain and heart painfully twisting back to life as he opens his eyes to the wraith's face in the seconds before his friends arrive and drag him with them.

Days later, back in Atlantis and on earth, he's healed and out of bed, but he coughs, a strange, ragged sound that everyone says will pass, just some lingering effect behind the scar, but it stays, quietly shadowing him for the rest of his life and leaving a bitterness in his throat.

Death, it seems, has a taste that's not quickly forgotten.

7.

Somewhere in the desert outside Vegas death finds Sheppard - not the one who knows it so well, but another one, different in so many ways and yet more alike than McKay had imagined. He doesn't die easily, but he doesn't fight it either, as if in dying he's found the peace that always evaded him in life. It's the middle of the day and no matter how hard he stares into the sky he can't see another galaxy, another world where a different version of himself will go on. This one will never see the Atlantis the stranger spoke of, will see only the wraith that killed him and not the ones the other has killed, so many he's lost count years ago. That one will risk his life again and again, without hesitating, for his team, for his friends, but he stopped the threat to an entire world. When the other Sheppard finally dies, it won't be alone, and he wonders if a heroic act unrecognized makes a man a hero, or if only the remembrance, the memory and honor of the act can bestow that name.

He's flat on his back in the desert sand, now, a steady stream of lifeblood trickling down his chest, and it's silent except for the faintest wind, but he thinks, at least, the stranger was wrong about one thing. The other Sheppard, the one the man knew, lives like a hero, but he dies like one, knowing that the dishonorably discharged soldier, the washed-up detective, the failed _man_ finally did something _right_.

He doesn't close his eyes in the end, and they stay fixed on that sky, clear and blue without a single star, and he thinks, right before it's gone, that he sees something, a faint shimmer, maybe only imagined, of a city in water, or maybe a glimpse, only a moment, but enough.

One final note worth mentioning: death, for all it's personification, is only a state of being, and not a living soul, and therefore incapable of meaning cruelty. So it's not strange to consider that it might be capable of kindness.


End file.
